SJ Merc on ourmedia.org
New Web sites to store public’s digital content
FREE SERVICES HELP SHARE MEDIA
By Michael Bazeley
Mercury News
Tapping into a growing interest in so-called grass-roots media, two Web sites launched this week that aim to become repositories and clearinghouses for a wide variety of digital content created by the public.
Ourmedia.org, started by Pleasanton writer J.D. Lasica and Walnut Creek technologist Marc Canter, is offering a central place for people to upload and store any digital media they want to share with the world, including video, audio, images and text files. The service is free.
The founders say the service (www.ourmedia.org) could help content producers find new audiences for their work. And it could become a cultural archive for researchers and future generations of Internet users that want to view history through an alternative media lens, say ourmedia’s founders.
The idea for the site, Lasica said, came to him while attending a digital storytelling conference in Sedona, Ariz.
“Here was this new storytelling form, and it needed an audience,” Lasica said.
Grassroots media has enjoyed an explosion of interest in the past year, fueled by the increased credibility of bloggers and the growing popularity of video and audio tools such as camcorders and editing software.
Content is proliferating. A video blogging Internet discussion board — which had only about 50 members in December — now has about 5,500. On the audio side, a new trend called podcasting has spawned thousands of amateur Internet radio shows.
Few limits
The Ourmedia site puts few limits on the type of content that people can submit, beyond a prohibition on pornography and already copyrighted material. How-to videos are as valid as home video of Little League baseball games, student films or political videos. Original music by independent artists is welcome.
The site is not limited to amateurs. Recording artist David Byrne recently uploaded a new single, “My Fair Lady,” for example.
The Internet Archive, a non-profit group in San Francisco that is building its own massive digital library, has agreed to host the Ourmedia files on its Web servers.
By itself, Ourmedia’s free hosting is a boon to video and audio artists, who can face costly storage and bandwidth fees when they upload large media files to the Web.
“This is like a godsend, getting this for free,” said Jay Dedman, the training coordinator at a New York community television station and moderator of the video blogging discussion group.
`Compelling’ material
Brewster Kahle, founder of the Internet archive, said digital media archiving also can be useful in ways that people may not yet realize.
“What would you give to see video of your great-grandmother?” Kahle said. “I’d give a lot. These may not be the scholarly texts of the next generation. But this is compelling nonetheless.”
So far, Ourmedia is all volunteer-run. The group is seeking non-profit status and looking for funding through grants and foundations that might support a small staff.
The site’s purpose goes far beyond archiving. The Ourmedia mission statement says a goal is to become “a clearinghouse that allows anyone to search for licensed video, audio or music, download it and remix it.”
Canter said he envisions Ourmedia as the foundation for a new, far-reaching system for finding and distributing digital media.
The organization eventually plans to release the source code of its Web site, potentially spawning an array of similar Web sites and media repositories, he said.
The group also is talking with companies such as Yahoo and Google about hosting media files on their own servers. It wants third-party developers to build their own interfaces to its content. And the group is exploring peer-to-peer technology that would allow Ourmedia to become a gateway to media files stored on individual personal computers.
Much of Ourmedia’s vision is shared by another site called NowPublic (www.nowpublic.com) that launched this week. Based in Vancouver, B.C., the site allows everyday people to act as editors, reporters and photographers. A user submits “assignments” requesting information about a particular topic or event, and others upload video, photos or text to complete the story.
“It’s not replacing regular media,” founder Michael Tippett said. “It’s augmenting it. It’s kind of a clearinghouse for news media.”
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Contact Michael Bazeley at mbazeley@mercurynews.com or (408) 920-5642, and read his blog at www.siliconbeat.com.